How Russian workers spread the word ALEX CHIS, a member of the editorial committee of Independent Politics in the United States, was in Moscow in October to attend the international labour conference ``Modern Telecommunications: New Vistas for Workers' Solidarity'', which was primarily organised by the KAS-KOR Labour Information Centre. He describes what labour movement activists are doing to establish their own lines of communication. KAS-KOR is an independent centre which exists to spread information on the workers movement in the ex-USSR. Just three years old, it got its start during the coal miners' strikes in 1990 when, as Kirill Buketov, one of the main organisers of KAS-KOR, said in an interview in Independent Politics magazine: ``It was a big problem for strike committees to organise an exchange of information and how to cooperate because the USSR was a big country. When in one city the strike only started, in another city the strike was finished. It was a very big problem to organise a coordination of activity in different cities. And our official newspapers and magazines and radio and TV gave only false information.'' The fact that the conference took place at all is a tribute to KAS-KOR's determination. Yeltsin's coup and the state of emergency threw the proceedings in doubt, but they decided too much work had taken place in the planning and organisation of the conference, and they would go ahead anyway. Just one week before the conference was to begin, the army took over the conference site. Organising furiously, with the help of friends such as Vassily Balog, of the International Department of the General Confederation of Trade Unions, KAS-KOR was able to find an alternative site, at a trade union school in the village of Saltikovka, just outside of Moscow. They also had to organise a special bus for participants, all this during a curfew and state of emergency. Among the speakers was Anatoly Voronov, the head of Glasnet, a computer network with links to Peacenet in the United States and Pegasus in Australia. During the events around the coup, while the print media were censored, he put out Glasinfo via electronic mail, making available many of the stories which had been censored from the print media. This made some of his friends in the West concerned for his safety. But as Anatoly said, when Glasnet USA ``sent me a message worrying about the censorship in Russia, and asking whether Glasnet ought to be more circumspect in the coverage of the situation in Russia, I checked the Russian Law on the Press, and discovered that electronic networks are not included in the list of mass media.'' Vassily Balog spoke on ``Modern Technologies: New Possibilities for Workers' Solidarity''. During the coup Vassily put out information on the arrests of Boris Kagarlitsky and other leaders of the Party of Labour to computer bulletin boards, facilitating the mass response leading to their release. He is the moderator of a computer conference on labour in the ex-USSR. These two typified the type of speakers at the conference, not just computer experts but participants in the movement as well. People from throughout Russia, from Kazakhstan and Lithuania, as well as the West, participated. Although attendance was cut by the October events, the conference was a success by any standards. KAS-KOR is an activist group consisting of a few paid staff and a much larger group of volunteers in Moscow, ages averaging from 21 to 28, who have so many projects it's hard to keep up with them. They do a weekly labour radio show, on the major radio station in the ex-USSR with a potential listenership of about 300 million, which has to be the most widely heard labour show in the world. They produce a weekly Russian-language bulletin of news on the workers movement, which is distributed to about 500 organisations. Their network of about 300 correspondents throughout the ex-USSR supplies the news. They have just begun a new project, producing an attractive new quarterly English-language magazine, Russian Labor Review. RLR is able to cover the events and debates in the labour movement throughout the ex-USSR in a comprehensive way. Like KAS-KOR itself, is thoroughly non-sectarian, with articles from a wide variety of viewpoints. For anyone at all interested in the ex-USSR or the international labour movement, it's a must. Subscribers also demonstrate solidarity with the workers movement in Russia, and help KAS-KOR in its work of spreading the word on workers' struggles throughout the ex-USSR and the world. It is hoped that the financial success of this project will make it possible to begin other projects, such as the new Russian language newspaper, Workers' Action, a joint project of KAS-KOR in Moscow and the NERV centre in St Petersburg.